C diff testing 'inaccurate'

31st October 2008

Research carried out by Professor Sanjeev Krishna and his team from St George's NHS Trust has found that hospital testing for Clostridium difficile are not precise enough.

The research will be published in December's Lancet Infectious Diseases. Hospital tests usually look for the presence of a Clostridium difficile toxin from patients' stool samples, but the research showed significant false and missed positive results. The authors wrote: "No assay reliably fulfilled the criteria we preset for an acceptable single test to detect CDT."